What is I-O?

Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of working and the application of that science to workplace issues facing individuals, teams, and organizations.
The scientific method is applied to investigate issues of critical relevance to individuals, businesses, and society.

A New Science Gives It a Rigorous Evaluation

Whether the task is flying a plane, fighting a battle, or caring for a patient, good teamwork is crucial to getting it done right.

That’s why team-building and training courses are big business in the U.S. and have been for decades. But lately something has changed.

“There’s a demand for evaluations—an emphasis on showing that team training makes a difference in safety, decision making, communication, clinical outcomes—you name the ultimate criteria the industry has,” said SIOP Past President Eduardo Salas, a professor at the University of Central Florida.

“We are developing a new science to show what works and doesn’t work and why,” said Salas, who wrote the article with graduate students Marissa L. Shuffler and Deborah Diaz Granados.

A team is not just a machine for doing things; it is a system of social relations, he explained. Team training is about instilling knowledge, skills, and attitudes—needed competencies. Team building helps individuals on a team learn about each other, clarify roles, work through problems, and cooperate toward accomplishing shared goals.

Most interventions focus on the latter—“team building is the largest human-resources intervention in the world,” Salas said—even though it has been found to improve performance little or not at all. “One conclusion we can begin to reach is that maybe both have a place,” he added. “They are distinct interventions.”

But organizations rarely do the front-end work of figuring out which they need. The science of teamwork is young, Salas said. For one thing, the successes get published but the failures fade into the ether. And although it’s relatively easy to find out if people liked a program or absorbed some of the knowledge it imparted, it’s far more complicated to evaluate whether workers have adopted the behaviors they’ve been trained in or are meeting longer term goals such as improving safety, decision making, or patient outcomes. But financial officers are no longer willing to take people off the job and invest millions on team training without some assurance that they’ll get what they paid for.

The demand has been invigorating for the science of teamwork, Salas suggests.

“Because of the push for results, we are getting better at collecting the data and are making a better case for cause and effect,” he said, “I’m a little cautious, but the data are encouraging. We are showing that training produce results.”

For more information about this study, please contact Eduardo Salas at esalas@ist.ucf.edu.

Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes concise reviews on the latest advances in theory and research spanning all of scientific psychology and its applications.